Free Reprisal by Ian Barclay

felt
     her moist lips and tongue on the head of his cock. This wasn’t making the car any easier to steer.
    Finally, he pulled into the parking lot of her apartment building and eased into a remote corner beneath a tree. He turned
     the car engine off and let his body’s motor run at full throttle in Sylvia’s throat.

Chapter
4

    Omar Zekri was having bad dreams. They’d start out good, with Ali smiling and everybody happy. Then Ali’s face would begin
     to disintegrate, in the middle of a smile, and the contents of his skull would leak like those of an overripe melon. Or worse
     would happen. Omar had taken to staying awake, sitting up all night in an old armchair, taking cat naps, trying never to allow
     himself to become immersed in deep sleep and those horrible dreams.
    He even eased up on booze and coasted all day on beer, to calm his nerves. With the lack of sleep, he hardly had enough energy
     to be nervous anyway. He just went from place to place, doing what he had to do, too sick to sorrow, too tired to think.
    Awad and Zaid came around every day. Sometimes several times. He would bump into them in unexpected places. Sometimes they
     would greet him and shake hands, as if they were very old friends or even cousins who had not seen each other for a long time.Other times they would pretend not to know him. He could never tell what they would do. The only thing he could be sure of
     was that no day would pass without his seeing them. Deep in his mind, he knew they were a more immediate threat to him than
     his scary apparitions of Ali. The dead did not harm the living. Omar kept telling himself that. It was the living he had to
     fear more than the dead. He was not afraid of Ali. The dreams were what he was afraid of….
    He could not sleep.
    Omar had expected to be tortured and killed when he admitted to Zaid and Awad that he collected information for the Americans.
     Instead, the two men had given him three bottles of Scotch and a hundred Egyptian pounds. All he had to do in the future was
     to pass the information from some of his contacts through Egyptian military clearance before he gave it to his American contact.
     As they explained, he was now working
with
his own government instead of against it. He had nothing to fear now about getting caught for treason. Why then did Awad
     and Zaid keep circling him like two sharks? Did they think he might be tempted, for more money, to tell the Americans how
     some of the information was now being monitored by the Egyptians? Of course, Omar had considered this opportunity. He had
     dismissed it as being too risky, considering what would happen to him if he disobeyed Zaid and Awad.
    He wondered what Pritchett would do to him if he found out what was going on. Pritchett seemed pleasant enough, but so were
     all American Embassy spies—or at least the two who had been his contacts beforePritchett. They were trained to be pleasant and inconspicuous. No doubt they were trained also to deal with Egyptian informants
     who double-crossed them. Pritchett would shoot him and push his body in the Nile. Which was not so bad, really, when he thought
     about what Zaid and Awad said they would do to him.
    “Thank you, ladies and gentlemen,” John Keegan said to the assembled reporters from the dais with the State Department seal,
     signaling that the news conference was over. “I only have time for one or two questions.”
    He pointed to a black woman.
    “Sir, can you tell us why Defense seems to be going along with State these days on President Ahmed Hasan? Has President Reagan
     told them to shape up?”
    “Not to my knowledge, Charlayne. I think I am free to say that we are beginning to hear some heartening things from Egypt.
     That is not to say that everything has changed overnight for the better, but there are definite, encouraging signs… that is
     all I can say. I think that everybody sees now that we must be patient—that we must give President Hasan a chance. It